"There will be no free re-customization for characters after new character models."

Well Forums, You know what to do.

And since people responded to it well, I'll also post a long post I made.

To sum up everything:

1. We are not asking for recustomizations to become free. We are asking for them to either give us a 1-time free customization for any existing character of a race (above ~level 60), or to add face and skin color to the barber shop for all races, and make recustomization be a way simply to change your character's gender and name.

2. We are not complaining about the new models. We like the new models. However, the new models significantly change how our characters look, no matter how "faithful" they stay to the original. In essence, it changes the personality of our character. Asking for the ability to check the other faces they make to see if one fits our character's personality better is not asking much.

3. Some of us put hours into making a new character. For some people, WoW is ALL about their characters. Having our characters changed without any way to fix it to our liking without paying $15 per character is not okay. Blizzard risks not only losing the VAST MAJORITY of RP players, but many many many regular players as well.

4. The free level 90 is NOT a substitute. Do not use it as an excuse. If you only play 1 character, it might be, but not everyone plays only 1 character. Likewise, the fact we can change everything except our face and skin color in the barber shop is not an excuse. The face is what defines our character, and they're changing them.

5. Just because something is SIMILAR to the original does not mean it is the same. From the models they have shown us, the ONLY race without SIGNIFICANT changes to their face are male orcs. This is the equivalent if say, you order Orange Juice at a restaurant and ask for a refill. Without asking, the person squeezes you a grapefruit into your orange juice, because it looks similar. Then in order to get a new drink, because THEY ruined your drink, you have to pay extra. No restaurant in the world would do this, because they'd lose a customer, and anyone they know.

Male Dwarves have a hugely changed face, not only including eye color, but their foreheads, eye shape, and mouths. The female gnome face we saw was converted from one of the "Serious" looks, but looks like someone slapped her with a happy stick. The female dwarf has the biggest changes of all. They are amazing, yes, but they look nothing like the original look. There's not a single detail on the new face that looks like the old. The male tauren also has significant changes due to the smoothing of the fur.

We should be allowed to make our characters feel right again, for free. It's not a hard request, or unreasonable. We are not acting like entitled brats. We are acting like we have put years into our characters, and having them changed and being told to deal with it and pay extra to fix it is wrong. Microsoft told people to deal with it, and their pre-orders were astronomically low. This led to the person who said that to being fired (and left to Zynga), and their entire stance changing, in order to keep fans.

6. Just because YOU don't care what your character looks like does NOT mean the rest of us don't. We aren't claiming everyone has an issue with this. However, a large amount of people do, as showcased by multiple post capped threads over the past 24 hours, and a huge thread on MMO-Champion.

7. If your character doesn't matter that much to you how bout a new deal? Every single character in the game is deleted. Period. You get free level 90s equal to how many you have. Nothing else will be reimbursed. After all, the characters don't matter to you, so why should you care? This is how it feels to us. They are NOT our characters. They were changed on us, and we're being told if we want to make them our characters again, (or try to), we have to pay to do so. We may not be able to make them feel like our characters again, in which case most of us will probably have to delete a few characters and reroll as a new race. However, the fact remains that most of them will easily be able to replicate the feel with a new face.

8. There would be no strain on the system, and they do not need to do a lot of work for this. They can simultaneously flag every X race for a free recustomization easily during a quick realm restart. They do this on the PTR constantly.

Say when 6.0 comes out, Humans, Orcs, Dwarves, Gnomes, Tauren, and Trolls are done. They could EASILY flag all level 60+ Humans, Orcs, Dwarves, Gnomes, Tauren, and Trolls for a recustomization in about 5 minutes. This would not affect the servers because 6.0 comes before the expansion is actually live. When 6.1 comes out and has say Night Elves and Forsaken? Release a small patch a week before the main patch comes out that updates the models, and flag all level 60+ NEs or Forsaken for recustomizatons. No stress on servers on patch day. Same goes for 6.2 and any other races.

9. If you don't care how your character looks, how about they remove transmogrification? How about all armor? After all, if it's all the same to you, why should they make unique looking armor in the first place? Why not have all plate wearers in a plain suit of armor, all mail wearers in a suit of chain mail, all leathers in a tunic, and all cloth in a robe? All weapons be normalized as well? Because people DO care about how their characters look. And changing something significantly without allowing us to fix it is NOT okay.

This minor decision Blizzard has made may have a significant impact on their bottom line and the playerbase if it goes through, which is what people have been discussing at length for the past day now.

I'm curious about the source of the quote, not that it's necessarily inaccurate, I'm just curious about the context (and I hadn't heard this in the panels/interviews I saw). It seems maybe a bit early for us to make an determination about something like that when we're still waist-deep in the process of creating the models and their various hair, skin and appearance options. I'd like to get some clarity about it though if someone can help find me a source!

Sent you a Tweet, but I guess putting it here is also helpful: ~08:00:20 on the Main Stage, Day 2 during Tom's interview.

Thank you!

"... we don't currently plan to force a character re-customization on everybody when this comes out. The idea is that "oh yeah, this very much feels like my character I've been playing for years" if you want to change that you can use our character recustomization service or you can go to the barbershop and pay some gold to change your hair or whatever it is."

That's a direct quote, if that's helpful at all to compare to what MMO has posted.

Once again I want to say this. The question didn't mention at all about a free customization. It only asked about if it's possible to get a customization. I think either Jay or whatever read the question wrong or the guy asked it wrong.

Again I think it's just way too early to make a determination, and Tom certainly didn't give a definite answer. Our artists are going to extreme lengths to ensure the new models and animations embody (kyuck knyuck?) what you know and love about your characters. Our hope (and Tom's point) is that you log in, go AWESOME, and enjoy playing your character that still looks and moves and acts like your character - just at a much higher fidelity. If it comes down to it and we just totally miss the mark I'm sure we'd at least seriously consider offering a chance to pick something else. But again, too early to say for sure.

Again I think it's just way too early to make a determination, and Tom certainly didn't give a definite answer. Our artists are going to extreme lengths to ensure the new models and animations embody (kyuck knyuck?) what you know and love about your characters. Our hope (and Tom's point) is that you log in, go AWESOME, and enjoy playing your character that still looks and moves and acts like your character - just at a much higher fidelity. If it comes down to it and we just totally miss the mark I'm sure we'd at least seriously consider offering a chance to pick something else.

With all due respect, Bash, the quote (including the additional context Chaud just posted) seems fairly definitive to me. It's only not definitive in the "it's pre-beta and anything could change" sense, but his statement was not ambiguous. His current plan is to not offer free recustomizations. Maybe he'll change his mind, but, well, that's the point of this thread: to get the policy changed.

That's cool if you want to take it that way, but there's no policy. It's current thoughts based on sound intent of a faithful update for current looks and options.

>Blue pretending to be completely oblivious to a topic that's probably been drilled and rehearsed at the office over the course of months.

>It gives the sheeple hope that maybe there's been a little misinformation about the issue entirely.

>They stop making threads about it.

>I'm amazed at big companies abilities to get their customers to !@#$ about things they want them to.

Damage Control 101.

Haha! We make video games. I go to work in pajamas sometimes. I walk around the office barefoot regularly. At what point do you believe a barefooted pajama guy goes into a meeting to scheme on how to direct the conversation for something as universally requested and wanted as new character models? Your description actually makes me kind of jealous, I wish I were that organized.

Haha! We make video games. I go to work in pajamas sometimes. I walk around the office barefoot regularly. At what point do you believe a barefooted pajama guy goes into a meeting to scheme on how to direct the conversation for something as universally requested and wanted as new character models? Your description actually makes me kind of jealous, I wish I were that organized.